Surprise - lots of meaningless doomsday reporting about climate change for outcomes that’s never going to happen.
Why scientists retired the dire climate scenario used for over a decade:
While global warming is still a serious threat, the decision to back away from a worst-case outlook raises questions about whether some risks have been overstated.
It’s rare for technical papers about climate modelling to kick off a heated public debate, or attract attention from the White House.
But that’s what happened recently after an international team of researchers published a major revision of the emissions scenarios used to study global warming.
When scientists try to model how hot Earth could get this century, they typically look at a range of possibilities for how much planet-warming pollution humans might pump into the atmosphere. These scenarios get updated every seven years or so.
In this latest update, the researchers abandoned a dire – and often criticised – high-emissions scenario known as RCP8.5 that has been prominently cited in thousands of climate studies over the past decade. The authors said the scenario was now “implausible” given recent energy trends.
That provoked online arguments among scientists. For years, critics of the high-emissions scenario had argued that it was always unrealistic, in part because it envisioned that countries would burn coal at absurdly high rates. They argued that any studies or news reports relying on that scenario exaggerated the risks of climate change. Why, those critics now asked, did the course correction take so long?
Many scientific studies have wrongly referred to RCP8.5 as a “business-as-usual” scenario, suggesting that this was the pathway humanity is headed for. News stories about climate research often emphasised results based on RCP8.5 as a picture of what the world can expect unless countries slash their emissions, which isn’t right, either.
New York Times: Many on the political right have used the shift to attack climate science.
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